I decided to spend the week of Independence Day off of work to rest, relax, watch some soccer, and possibly clean the house.  Auggie the Doggie made me change my plans … not on purpose mind you, but it’s all his fault.

The pup is now on the disabled list, set for drugs & rest.  He has some degeneration in his shoulder leaving a bone chip to dislodge and cause him some significant pain.  Diagnosis is pain meds to see if it works itself out or heals itself over the next two weeks – and if it doesn’t they may need to go scope it out.

This likely was something that has been coming, but only recently did it become a problem.  In fact, it came on pretty fast.

Friday night, while playing around, I noticed he yelped a bit more than normal when I fist bumped his right paw.  Saturday morning, he had a limp.  That right paw specifically was giving him problems.  I told him to rub some dirt in it and he’d feel better.  He just stared blankly.  Sunday that limp got worse, and it looked as though something was hurt in his paw.  He could barely put any weight on it, and complained everytime I touched it.  I promised him we would go to the vet on Monday, though that made him just stare blankly at me … but that night things seemed to get a little more worry some.   See, he eats standing up.  He drinks water standing up.  He even does his business, surprisingly, standing up.  He didn’t want to stand, because it clearly hurt him tons to do that.   He could move around generally, but … just didn’t want to.  Worried, I spent Sunday night feeding him by hand, or putting water next to his snout.  He wasn’t in life threatening shape or anything, but it was clear things weren’t right in his world .. which you can guess meant there wasn’t much right with my world.

Monday came, and he looked better, but more like got a good night of sleep and tried to hide the pain better.  We got an appointment at the vet.  A few x-rays, some reviews, and the diagnosis came in.

The plan right now is to keep him drugged up for the next 5 days, and possibly up to 2 or 3 weeks.  If his condition improves, we’ll back off the pain meds to see if it’s healed up.  If it doesn’t, then we start talking surgery.

Part of the problem, though, is he can hide the pain pretty well.  Stoic, strong breeds like him will try to muscle through the pain … until it gets too much.  I am spotting it pretty well, but right now it’s at a heartbreaking level.

But then again, he’s a tough dog.  He’s put up with me for nearly 6 years, he has to be tough.

I’m of course dealing with it differently.  First of all, I am using this as an excuse to may my staycation extra lazy … I won’t miss a single World Cup soccer match thanks to him.  I don’t even have to leave my couch to watch him during this time.  Pain pills means having some way to make sure he will eat the pain pills — so there’s tons of cheese in the house (way more than is needed for the pills, so that’s one in my win column).  I am sleeping pretty well at night, because I don’t get the 2am wake-up call that comes when someone sniffs a raccoon in our yard and has to bark excessively at it.  I may even be able to clean the house without paw prints … if I get off the couch.  Then again, it’s probably better that I stay at home; because rehab-ing a dog is frickin’ expensive.  I mean, you can’t buy love but keeping it around breaks the bank.

Then again, you could just say I am dealing with the heartache of the situation with humor and sarcasm … yeah, you could say that if you wanna be a jerk.

That’s the way we are spending our time off, being jerks.  Here’s hoping, however, that this is in fact temporary; that this heals and he returns to his usual annoying, farting, self.